New Gentoo and Linux user here. And it seems that everything is going wrong.

First off, /etc/portage/make.conf is actually in /etc/make.conf. Everything else is where it should be.

Now for my problem. I ran `emerge xorg-server`, and after installing 69 packages I updated my enivornment variables and ran `startx`. All went well for about 400 miliseconds, and which point the server managed to have a Fatal Error (no monitors).
I have 2 ATI Radeon cards in my computer, with 2 monitors connected to 3 outputs. There is no way Linux can't find a monitor.
I tried to fix this manually (nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/), but the directory hadn't been created, and there were no config files either. Okay, I said. `Xorg --configure`. That didn't help, Xorg wasn't able to write to a disk.

Any suggestions? I can use a CLI easily, but a GUI is essential for doing my homework.

What are the contents of your /var/log/Xorg.0.log?
What do you have in your make.conf file?
How are the device drivers / graphics portion of your kernel config set?
what window manager / desktop environment are you trying to run?

How are the
device drivers / graphics portion
of your kernel config set?

I do not know how to edit this
information, although I can tell
you that I checked and made sure
everything regarding ATI Radeon
was checked ON. If you could give
me a file which would have that
information, that would be nice.

griever wrote:

what window
manager / desktop environment are
you trying to run?

As of right now, I am trying to
install GNOME but it was suggested
by the wiki that I test `startx`
before I did that.
[/quote]_________________--
System Details:
4 Hard Drive, IDE/P-ATA/Ultra-ATA, CD and DVD reader/burner
PowerPC: Xserve G4, 1.33 GHz Dual Processors, 2 GB of RAM.
32Bit

New Gentoo and Linux user here. And it seems that everything is going wrong.

These are just opportunities for learning.
Its quite normal. It all depends on your point of view.

Aviator45003 wrote:

First off, /etc/portage/make.conf is actually in /etc/make.conf. Everything else is where it should be.

Thats OK, both locations work.
make.conf has been moved to /etc/portage very recently.

The best approach to Gentoo, is to make it work first, make if faster/better/shinier later. That way, you can back out changes to get back to something that works.
The first target is therefore to get Xorg to work on your primary display. Thats the one that displays your boot messages.

You have 2 ATI Radeon cards. You have a choice of driver for Xorg. Which one did you intend to use ?

You go on to say

Code:

VIDEO_CARDS="radeon"

thats a good choice, however, the radeon driver needs kernel support. How did you build your kernel?
The radeon driver should just work on a single display when all its kernel support is there. No xorg.conf required. As I said, we will add that later.
If you have an xorg.conf move it to xorg.conf_broken, attempt to startx, then ...

Make friends with wgetpaste and use it to post the following:-
Your entire dmesg
Your latest /var/log/Xorg.0.log
Your /usr/src/linux/.config
Any one of these is too big to fit in a post, tell the URLs you get back from wgetpaste._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

New Gentoo
and Linux user here. And it seems
that everything is going wrong.

These are just
opportunities for learning.
Its quite normal. It all depends
on your point of view.

Thank you! I am only running
Gentoo because I want to know
everything I can about Linux, so
learning is all I'm here for.

NeddySeagoon wrote:

Avia
tor45003 wrote:

First off,
/etc/portage/make.conf is actually
in /etc/make.conf. Everything else
is where it should be.

Thats OK, both locations
work. make.conf has been moved to
/etc/portage very recently.

The best approach to Gentoo, is to
make it work first, make if
faster/better/shinier later. That
way, you can back out changes to
get back to something that works.
The first target is therefore to
get Xorg to work on your primary
display. Thats the one that
displays your boot messages.

You have 2 ATI Radeon cards. You
have a choice of driver for Xorg.
Which one did you intend to use
?

They are the same card, just
different revisions. I will
probably pull out the
single-output one soon, it is too
annoying to run with. If you look
for the Xserve G4 online, you will
find my cards. One is the
DVI/S-Video/VGA one, and one is
just VGA.

NeddySeagoon wrote:

You go on to
say

Code:

VIDEO_CARDS="radeon"

thats a good choice,
however, the radeon driver needs
kernel support. How did you build
your kernel? The radeon driver
should just work on a single
display when all its kernel
support is there. No xorg.conf
required. As I said, we will add
that later. If you have an
xorg.conf move it to
xorg.conf_broken, attempt to
startx, then ...

Make friends with wgetpaste and
use it to post the following:-
Your entire dmesg
Your latest /var/log/Xorg.0.log
Your /usr/src/linux/.config
Any one of these is too big to fit
in a post, tell the URLs you get
back from wgetpaste.

Yes Sir. Wgetpaste emerged, now
trying to run a shell from nano
(my new favorite text editor,
until I know enough to find better
or configre nano more).

Note: Is there a better way than
>>ing the output of wgetpastes to
a text file from nano? Suggest an
editor I should become friends
with?
dmesg

Sorry, those last two lines slipped into a shorthand I have not yet learned. Could you please translate it for me?

I downloaded the most recent stage3 tarball for PPC32 when I installed about 2 weeks ago. Perhaps it is about time that tarball was updated?_________________--
System Details:
4 Hard Drive, IDE/P-ATA/Ultra-ATA, CD and DVD reader/burner
PowerPC: Xserve G4, 1.33 GHz Dual Processors, 2 GB of RAM.
32Bit

The kernel is not a part of the stage3 tarball. You get the kernel using

Code:

emerge gentoo-sources

or vanillia-sources, or hardended-sources ....
You get to choose. How you configure your kernel is then up to you, unless you use something like genkernel but that may not work on PPC.

A few years ago now, the

Code:

< > ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support (DEPRECATED) --->

became depreciated in favour of the new drivers under the

Code:

<*> Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drivers --->

These drivers depend on

Code:

<*> SCSI disk support

so regardless of how your drives are connected to your motherboard, they will have scsi names, starting /dev/sd..

Worse from your point of view, udev will not make the depreciated /dev/hd.. nodes, so your system will fail to boot at rootfsck, as the /dev/hdaX node won't be there to be checked.

The kernel contains lots of drivers for various hardware, some of which conflict with others. To use the modern radeon driver for your video card, you need to select Radeon DMS and Kernel Mode Switching (KMS) beneath it. The search option in menuconfig will help. Press /

KMS conflicts with framebuffer drivers, so all of the framebuffer hardware specific drivers in

Code:

<*> Support for frame buffer devices --->

must be set to off, or your video card won't work._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

The kernel is not a part of the stage3 tarball. You get the kernel using

Code:

emerge gentoo-sources

or vanillia-sources, or hardended-sources ....
You get to choose. How you configure your kernel is then up to you, unless you use something like genkernel but that may not work on PPC.

A few years ago now, the

Code:

< > ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support (DEPRECATED) --->

became depreciated in favour of the new drivers under the

Code:

<*> Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drivers --->

These drivers depend on

Code:

<*> SCSI disk support

so regardless of how your drives are connected to your motherboard, they will have scsi names, starting /dev/sd..

Worse from your point of view, udev will not make the depreciated /dev/hd.. nodes, so your system will fail to boot at rootfsck, as the /dev/hdaX node won't be there to be checked.

The kernel contains lots of drivers for various hardware, some of which conflict with others. To use the modern radeon driver for your video card, you need to select Radeon DMS and Kernel Mode Switching (KMS) beneath it. The search option in menuconfig will help. Press /

KMS conflicts with framebuffer drivers, so all of the framebuffer hardware specific drivers in

Code:

<*> Support for frame buffer devices --->

must be set to off, or your video card won't work.

Okay, I reconfigured my kernel and recompiled according to the items you list above. Now when I boot up, the kernel doesn't seem to do any running at all. There is no disk usage (hardware monitors don't show any), displays don't change, nothing happens. Would you mind taking a look at my .config and see what I messed up this time?

I went through everything in my kernel, took 2 hours, using Menuconfig, and made sure I enabled everything I needed.

The only problem I found was that when I tried to outright disable Devices --> Graphics Support --> Framebuffer Devices, I could not (it was marked -*-, instead of the flexible <*> and [*] types). Is there anyway to actually disable framebuffer devices?

Today I got farther in the boot process. The compiled kernel made it to the boot screen (which was lined and erratic, impossible to read, and a complete mess, BUT it had the penguin up top, albiet copied across the screen and as horizontally screwed up as the rest.

Then the computer froze, and it must have completely frozen for 60 seconds because it rebooted (as I had instructed the kernel to do).

Oh, and I changed my hardware configuration recently (three days ago). I removed the VGA-Only Radion 7000, leaving the S-Video+DVI+VGA Radeon 7000. One display is connected to the DVI port by way of a DVI -> VGA adapter, and my main display is connected using VGA. Both showed the same messed-up screen, but at least they both were being used! I also replaced the old, broken Optical drive, with a brand-spanking-new-from-an-old-computer CD and DVD read/burner.

So the good news: It seems my kernel is now able to do basic bootup, and use the VGA displays. Also now able to use the front-panel LEDs on my Xserve.

The bad news: The bootup fails, but I don't know at what point. The displays don't show anything useful. Attempts at logging in failed, although I know not if I even reached a login point.

You cannot turn framebuffers off en mass. you have to disable the individual hardwsre options for each framebuffer.
That you saw the penguin at the top of the screen was encouraging. That showed that a framebuffer console was in use._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

You cannot turn framebuffers off en mass. you have to disable the individual hardwsre options for each framebuffer.
That you saw the penguin at the top of the screen was encouraging. That showed that a framebuffer console was in use.

'lspci -k' would be more useful (and you may need to run update-pciids)...

Still:
- CONFIG_DEVTMPFS should be on (probably with CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT)
- as already said, if you've got correct _ATA driver for your controller, CONFIG_IDE should be off
- (not really important, but) CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV_PSAUX can be off, CONFIG_SND_HRTIMER, CONFIG_TMPFS_POSIX_ACL, CONFIG_TMPFS_XATTR, probably should be on
- RV100...you're in for a lot ****hurt - that chip is so out of date, that the support is minimal these days (even r200 are working only on a basic level)
- all _FB_ options that need to be off, seem to be

I have gone into the config, first backing up .config, then running `make clean`, then restoring the config, then setting up all of the changes you folks suggested (Alt-F2 is my friend), then `make && make modules_install`. I get the same problem as I did before, my config file is identical but for the aforementioned modifications.

The boot screen looks just like any regular startup process except:
It seems to panic before any text-colour is introduced, but I can't be sure because:
Imagine the Tux logo, except randomly sized horizontal segments are spread across the width of the display. I'm sure that if I stacked everything up like a puzzle, I'd get the double-tux-logo. Now imagine that effect duplicated for every line of text the entire way down. Yes, text scrolls, but it is incomprehensible.

If anybody has ideas, I'm open to try them. Really am, I would LOVE to run Gentoo on my old system, even if I never get to upgrade the graphics again. At least it'd be useful for something.

I'm beginning to look into Yellow Dog Linux for this computer, in case my RV100 problem is too major to overcome and there are no drivers. I defenitely will use Gentoo, even if not on this computer, then on my RaspberryPi, or another computer when I get it.

Just a note, I'm using my first Kernel, the FrameBuffer Enabled one, to make all the changes to my Gentoo main kernel, the ones that keep messing up. That one works just fine._________________--
System Details:
4 Hard Drive, IDE/P-ATA/Ultra-ATA, CD and DVD reader/burner
PowerPC: Xserve G4, 1.33 GHz Dual Processors, 2 GB of RAM.
32Bit

The bootloader would still be poiting to the same image "kernel-3.4.9-gentoo". I `rm /boot/kernel-3.4.9-gentoo`, then `cp vmlinux /boot/kernel-3.4.9-gentoo`, so I don't think the bootloader would need to be updated..._________________--
System Details:
4 Hard Drive, IDE/P-ATA/Ultra-ATA, CD and DVD reader/burner
PowerPC: Xserve G4, 1.33 GHz Dual Processors, 2 GB of RAM.
32Bit

Okay, so that makes sense...
What about support for my other Kernel, the backup one?
Would I be able to use BOTH /dev/hdX /dev/sdX?_________________--
System Details:
4 Hard Drive, IDE/P-ATA/Ultra-ATA, CD and DVD reader/burner
PowerPC: Xserve G4, 1.33 GHz Dual Processors, 2 GB of RAM.
32Bit

udev does not make /dev/hd... entries, so with the old drivers, you can only get as far as root mounted read only and its not possible to mount other filesystems unless you either use a static /dev or make the needed /dev/hd.. nodes some other way._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.